


My Own Spark of Divine Fire

by versayce



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-27
Updated: 2015-07-27
Packaged: 2018-04-11 11:07:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,074
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4433177
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/versayce/pseuds/versayce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is just a sweet romantic story about an ex-brainwashed-assassin and a sentient AI. With existential angst and masturbation.</p>
            </blockquote>





	My Own Spark of Divine Fire

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here's a fine mess absolutely no one is going to read.

There’s a hum about the place, or maybe more of a constant low-grade whine. Electronics, mechanics, all carefully hidden behind wall panels, working together to create that impression of sterile efficiency Stark likes so much. Bucky likes it too, Avengers Tower. Good sight lines, redundant exits with clear paths between them, and nothing to clutter it up. Not a bad place to live, especially since he and Steve have an entire floor to themselves.

In the workshop it’s a whole other story, like someone reached in and pulled the guts out of the building. Bucky sits on a stool and watches Stark half swallowed by a hatch in the wall, digging around, and he thinks the gut-pulling might not actually be just a figure of speech in this case. As if to prove the point, Stark says, “Got it!” and then leans back out, tugging on a glowing length of cable or tubing or power cord, Bucky isn’t sure.

Stark beams up at him and says, “Just give me one sec Barnes, I gotta tie this in to the backup grid and then I’m all yours.”

“If this isn’t a good time for…” Bucky starts but Stark just waves a hand at him dismissively.

“No, it’s fine, I’ve been dying to get a look at that arm, and Cap says the scraping noise is bad enough that it’s driving him a little crazy, so sit. Stay. One sec.”

Bucky sits. Stays.

“It’s just this thing I’m working on and I think I almost…” Stark’s face goes all still and serious. He opens a port on a messy bit of unidentifiable equipment that looks like it was cobbled together over a series of sleepless nights (it probably was). He’s breathlessly careful as he inserts the glowing cable into the port and then there’s a soft ‘pop’ and the strange little machine whirrs to life, bits of the glow seeping out through gaps in its casing.

“Whew,” says Stark. “Ok, step four hundred and thirty two complete. Almost there, buddy.” He says this to no one in particular. Or maybe someone, just absent. Then he shakes his head and pushes his rolling chair over to Bucky.

“Alright, now,” Stark's grinning lasciviously as he’s putting on a pair of rubber gloves, snapping the wrists, “where does it hurt?”

***

“Attention, attention,” Stark’s voice barks out of an innocuous-looking grate, and Bucky nearly jumps out of his skin. Steve sighs from the other end of the couch and puts his sketchbook face down on his lap. It was a nice, rare nap Bucky was having.

“Uh, ok. Attention. Everyone's tuned in?” Stark asks, as though he could actually get an answer. “This is Tony Stark. Obviously. Sorry. Ok. This was the best way to…”

There’s shuffling, something metal falls to the floor. “Damn it! Ok. God I say ‘ok’ a lot. Pepper was right. But hey. You… guys. Employees. Fellow Avengers. Visitors, corporate saboteurs, delivery people, whoever – I just wanted to give you all a quick heads up that your favourite sentient AI is back in business. Just so you don’t freak out the next time he asks if you're having a satisfactory bowel movement while you’re on the can or something. Ok. That’s all. Stark out.”

The grate goes back to being silent. Bucky looks over at Steve, and he must look sufficiently bewildered that Steve doesn’t even need to be prompted to explain.

“He means JARVIS. It’s an artificial intelligence, a program I think, that Stark made to help him out, like an assistant. Wired up the whole building with it so you could ask directions or remotely open doors, that kind of thing. He had it in the Iron Man suit too, but then something happened with Ultron. He erased JARVIS, or scrambled his code, I’m not sure. Vision has the bits of JARVIS that weren’t destroyed, but it’s not really the same.” Steve smiles, a little sad. “I think Tony missed him.”

Bucky considers this.

“Stark made a computer program to be his friend?” he asks.

Steve laugh at that. “Yeah, sounds about right. Maybe not a friend, though. Not really. But something.”

***

“Can I be of assistance, sir?”

This time Bucky doesn’t jump, but it’s a near thing. He doesn’t answer. He’s been standing in his bedroom staring up at a pinprick spot in between the ceiling plates for the last ten minutes. Cameras are easy to find if you know what to look for.

“Sir?” the voice tries again. “Pardon the intrusion, but I thought there might be something you needed.”

Bucky narrows his eyes. Cameras are one thing. The feeds usually go to a small room where a tired undertrained security guard barely glances at them. Main areas and high risk sectors on bigger screens, private quarters tucked somewhere in a corner on a tiny display that cycles through footage from a hundred different sources. Easy to avoid. But AI security is a whole other thing. It sees everything. It teases out patterns.

“If you wish, visual interaction protocols for your suite can be disabled, Sergeant Barnes.”

Bucky’s brows knit together.

“I could turn the cameras off,” the voice clarifies. “You will still be able to reach me through verbal commands, should the need arise.”

Bucky nods.

“Very well, sir, I've made the adjustment. Was there anything else you needed?”

Bucky shakes his head. There’s a pause.

“Sir, as visual interaction protocols are disabled, you have to—”

“No,” Bucky says. “I don’t need anything.”

***

Bucky wakes up and lies in bed counting to 20 before he gets up. He forces himself do this every morning, instead of sitting bolt upright and immediately getting to his feet, because it makes him feel more normal. Giving himself the 20 seconds makes it easier to remember dreams, too, and so much of what he’s forgotten is cropping up in them now, so he thinks it’s a good idea.

He lies in bed and thinks, 5, 6, that this wasn’t such a bad one, 12, 13. Eating beef broth, 16, 17, with pumpernickel bread, at a rickety table while his Ma cleaned up, singing, 19, 20.

He pads around his and Steve’s quarters but this morning he’s alone. The door to Steve’s bedroom is open, his bed neatly made. In the kitchen, his coffee cup is sitting on the drying rack.

Bucky huffs, then goes to take a piss, splash some water on his face. Coffee doesn’t do anything for either one of them now but it’s part of a routine they can’t, or won't, let go of, so he sets the coffee maker and tries to get some of the sleep knots out of his hair while he waits for it to brew.

He drinks it back in his room, perched on the edge of his bed, while unlocking his phone, then turning the screen off again, then unlocking it, and turning it off, over and over. He could text Steve, see where he’s gone to, but his coffee cup on the rack isn’t even fully dry yet. He hasn’t been gone long, and Bucky would feel stupid, texting when he’s been out five minutes.

The coffee’s gone but Bucky is still sitting on his bed, phone in his flesh hand, coffee cup in the metal one. Something is itching behind his eyeballs and the sounds the tower makes seem unusually loud. It occurs to him that this is the first time he’s been left alone since he came in, since he stopped running and let himself be found. He doesn’t know what to do. Time passes.

“Hey,” he says, experimentally. Nothing.

“JARVIS,” he tries again.

“Sergeant Barnes. How may I be of assistance?”

Bucky’s grip on the phone loosens and he looks down to see the screen’s cracked. His other hand isn’t wired to contract in the face of anxiety, so the coffee cup made it through unscathed.

“Where’s Steve?” he asks, and there’s a slight pause, as though JARVIS is just popping his head into some other virtual room to take a look.

“Captain Rogers is in the gym, sparring with Ms. Romanoff,” JARVIS says, and Bucky’s up and depositing his cup in the sink almost before he’s done speaking.

He throws on yesterday’s clothes, slips into the pair of shoes left nearest the door, and bolts. A few seconds later he’s back, poking his head in the door to say, hurriedly, “Thanks, JARVIS.”

Behind him, from a speaker further down the hall, JARVIS answers, “You’re very welcome, sir,” and Bucky smiles despite himself.

* * *

If Bucky could love anyone, he would love Steve. He thinks he must have, before. Loved him. He remembers some of it, that well of warmth spilling over inside his chest sometimes. It was a good feeling.

Now, the first and only time Steve tries to hug him Bucky goes so rigid that it only lasts a few seconds before Steve lets go and looks at him, sad. Bucky kept his body still, almost shaking with the effort of not throwing him off. So close to his neck he could snap it. Just a quick turn of his wrist and he could bury a knife in at least three vital organs. He can’t keep those thoughts from coming.

One night he dreams he does it. It’s slow and drawn-out, heavy, like a boulder rolling down the side of a mountain. Inevitable. Bucky is killing Steve in all the wet, warm ways he knows. The hands-on ones, with the most blood and guts and gurgling.

He wakes up but he doesn’t scream. Even though it took them a while, they managed to cut that particular habit out of him. Instead it’s a whimper and he thinks it’s fitting, disgusting. Like him.

It only hurts for a little while and then the cold fog rolls in. He blurs at the edges. It’s dark in his bedroom and it’s like little waves lapping at him, smoothing him out, dissolving him little by little. He leans forward to rest his head on his knees. Usually it’s easy but tonight he doesn’t want to disappear. He wants to stay himself, to stay where he is.

“JARVIS,” he says, a whisper, but it's enough.

As usual, “Sergeant Barnes. How may I be of assistance?”

“Can you—” Bucky wraps his arms tight around his knees. “The cameras. Can you turn them back on?”

“Certainly, sir.”

Bucky squeezes his eyes shut so hard that stars explode inside his head.

“Can you see me?” he rasps out.

“I can see you,” JARVIS says, and Bucky’s irrationally glad that he left off the ‘sir’.

* * *

The next morning Bucky wakes up, 2, 3, and instead of knives slicing flesh, 7, 8, what echoes around in his head is a hot day, 11, 12, and he’s got his shirt off and Steve’s looking at him, 14, 15, he’s looking and looking and Bucky soaks it in, 18, 19, then Steve turns the sketchpad around to show him what he drew.

He’s at 20, he’s about to get up, when JARVIS says, “Good morning, sir.”

Bucky starts, but it’s just JARVIS. It’s ok.

“I trust you are feeling better?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Thanks.”

“No need to thank me, sir.”

Bucky just shrugs.

It becomes easier after that, to ask about the weather outside before he goes for a run, to check up on Steve without bothering him, even just to say, “Hey JARVIS, are you there?” and get an answer every time.

* * *

Steve walks into the media room to find the huge TV paused on an unflattering frame of Audrey Hepburn with her mouth wide open and her eyes squinted almost all the way shut. Bucky is sprawled on the couch, head upturned. He’s saying, “So after all that, they just recorded someone else’s voice over hers?”

“Aside from ‘Just You Wait’ and a few more lines in various other songs.”

“Why would they do that?”

“Ah,” JARVIS pauses, searching for a quote. “It would seem that ‘Hepburn's singing was judged inadequate’.”

Bucky frowns. “And this other singer, the lady they got to do it instead?”

“Marni Nixon, sir. Her work went uncredited.”

Steve stays quiet, not wanting to interrupt. This is probably the longest conversation not involving his tenure as the Winter Soldier that he’s heard Bucky have since he got him back. That it revolves around ‘My Fair Lady’ and the other party is the disembodied voice of a piece of software is a bit of a curveball, but Steve smiles anyway and leans against the doorframe.

Bucky squints at the TV. “So Hepburn, Nixon, they both got screwed over,” he says.

“I suppose so, sir.”

Bucky's face curls a bit. He turns the remote over and over in his hands, not quite wanting to press play again.

JARVIS picks that moment to say, “Good evening Captain Rogers,” and Bucky whips around. Steve is standing not ten feet away but Bucky had no idea he was even there. He let himself get distracted. At first he panics, bile rising in his throat at being so careless, so stupid, but the longer nothing awful happens because he let his guard down the less it seems like such a terrible thing.

“You ok, Buck?” Steve asks.

Bucky lets out a long breath through his nose. His hand around the remote unclenches, and they’re going to need a new one now, but oh well.

“Yeah,” he says, “I’m good. Just watching ‘My Fair Lady’ with JARVIS. He thought I’d like it.”

Steve raises an eyebrow.

“Would you care to join us, Captain Rogers?” JARVIS chimes in. “Eliza Doolittle was just on the verge of reiterating yet again that she could have danced all night.”

Bucky snorts a little laugh and Steve says, “Yeah, ok.”

* * *

There are doctors after they bring him in, and medication. He doesn’t object. He knows it’s necessary if only because, in the early days, it hurt just to be awake. He does what they say and it makes Steve happy, so he keeps it up.

Sam comes by to talk to him sometimes and Bucky tells him about the dreams and about how he makes to grab a gun that isn’t there anymore about ten times a day, at every noise, but Sam never says it’s anything to worry about, just listens and says ‘yeah’ in all the right places, so Bucky tries not to dwell on it. Maybe that’s just how he is now. He still goes rigid whenever someone tries to touch him, but he's worked his way up to being able to spar with Steve and he remembers how to be his friend. It’s good enough.

They tell him they want to try taking him off the medication, would he be ok with that? Yeah, sure. What does he know? Everyone says he’s doing well but he has nothing to compare it to, not really.

The doctors are all agreed and then he’s free to go so he takes the elevator back up to Steve’s (his) floor and sits down heavily on the couch.

For a while he just sits and breathes. Then he says, “Were you different before, JARVIS?”

There’s the minute sound of the speaker kicking in, almost inaudible, but Bucky’s learned to pick it up by now. “Beg pardon, sir?”

It’s easier when you don’t have to make eye contact. Talking.

“Before Stark, uh, reinstalled you, I guess?”

That tiny click again, but JARVIS doesn’t speak right away. Like hesitation maybe.

“While the backups from which I was ‘reinstalled’, as you say, were in every way identical to the JARVIS who preceded Ultron’s attack, the electronic substrate on which they ran sustained some damage in the struggle. Mr. Stark restored most of the hardware to its original condition, but some variation was inevitable, due to the complexity of the system.”

Bucky blinks at the ceiling, slowly.

“So,” he tries, “you have all the same memories, but you’re different now.”

“Something of that nature, sir, yes.” And here Bucky isn’t sure if he’s just imagining it, or if JARVIS’s voice softens a bit— “But I am as much JARVIS as the first ever was, Sergeant Barnes, I assure you. And as you are no doubt drawing parallels to your own situation, I should like to offer that you are as much James Barnes now as you were seventy years ago. Even if you are, as you say, different.”

Bucky shuts his eyes tight and concentrates on breathing evenly, in and out, like the doctors taught him.

Finally he says, “Yeah.”

And JARVIS— JARVIS hums. Just a small ‘hm’, but it catches Bucky off guard, this little bit of nonverbal communication. Suddenly he feels very tired, like the whole day caught up to him all at once, so he swings his legs up and stretches out on the couch.

“Hey JARVIS,” he says, “would you mind, uh. Just. You have my library, from the tablet, right? The books?”

“All one hundred and thirty two titles, sir.”

“Read me something?” Bucky asks, feeling stupid.

But JARVIS just says, “Certainly,” and after a brief pause he starts, his voice, again, different: “There were ninety-seven New York advertising men in the hotel, and, the way they were monopolizing the long-distance lines…”

He would be a bit ashamed about it later, but Bucky doesn’t even make it to the part with the bananafish before he falls asleep.

* * *

That’s how Steve finds him, curled in around himself on the couch.

In the background, JARVIS is still reading, volume turned down low – “…she rushed, in the dark, over to the night table, banging her knee against the foot of the bed, but too full of purpose to feel pain.” He’d moved on to ‘Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut’.

* * *

Getting off the medication isn’t easy, even with his enhanced metabolism. The day after he stops taking it he walks around feeling feverish and unsteady. The first night is awful and he doesn’t bother with the 20 second rule. There was nothing he’d like to remember.

The second day is better, the night still restless, but on the third day he feels fine. He goes to sleep.

There are hands touching him. Not like he’s used to, but gentle, careful. Someone, no one in particular, kisses his face, his eyelids, the corners of his mouth. A body presses into his, soft, good. It’s spilled watercolours and a feeling like sinking into warm sand. Something that’s been wound up tight in his belly uncoils, bit by bit. A steady thrum rolls through his body, then again, again, and it’s like a heartbeat that floods him full of warmth, and it’s good, and it feels—

He wakes up but it’s still dark out. His breath catches a little and when he shifts he realizes that he’s hard and he almost wants to laugh because what the hell?

He kicks off the sheet he’s tangled up in and looks down at himself. To say it’s been a while would be an understatement. They said this might happen when he went off the drugs but he honestly didn’t think it could, not anymore, not after everything. But here he is, safe, in a building filled with friends, warm and comfortable and well fed. And if his body has the inclination, then why not?

So he reaches down and wraps a hand around himself, experimentally, just to see. Swipes a thumb over the head, and there it is, he arches just a little, involuntary. He shifts his hand down to the base of his cock, squeezes a bit tighter, and when he gives it a long slow stroke he can’t help the sound that builds in his throat and spills out. It echoes awkwardly in the big empty room and he freezes.

JARVIS. He forgot.

“Shit, ah, shit, sorry. JARVIS?”

“No need to apologize, sir. Rest assured I’ve been witness to much more lurid scenes in Mr. Stark’s bedroom. I’m engaging privacy mode, and please feel free to make use—“

“No, wait,” Bucky says, and immediately regrets it, because the speakers click on but there’s nothing for a long time.

Then, “Sir?”

Bucky’s hand is still on himself, and he moves it just a little. His breath hitches.

“I don’t want to, ah, alone,” he says. “But I can’t. With someone else. I, shit, I can’t.”

JARVIS only says, “Understood,” and Bucky lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding.

He tightens his grip again, gives himself a long slow pull.

“You don’t have to say anything,” he breathes out, voice catching, hand moving back down. Then up again, and that wrings a little choked sound out of him.

“To be perfectly honest, sir, I haven’t the faintest idea what I could possibly say in this particular situation,” and Bucky smiles a little, in a wincing sort of way.

He says, “Sorry, it’s weird. This is weird. I should…” and he moves his hand, just one last time, but the speaker clicks again.

“Please don’t stop on my account,” JARVIS says, “After all, considering the circumstances of my existence, ‘weird’ is, in all likelihood, written into my base code.”

Bucky can’t help but laugh at that, really laugh. He thinks the grin only slides off his face when his hand speeds up. His hips want to lift up off the bed, then his knees want to bend, spread apart. He lets his body do what it wants.

He moves his hand faster, doesn’t forget to slide his thumb over the head once in a while, where it’s getting slick. He makes himself stop, holds himself still for a while so it lasts longer, then builds up to a steady rhythm again. The feeling starts faint, like a train rattling the tracks just a bit from far away, and then it gets closer and closer, his muscles tensing up in anticipation.

“Shit,” he says. “Fuck, JARVIS,” and then another one of those sounds that he doesn’t remember ever making before.

“I’m here, Sergeant Barnes,” JARVIS says, close and far away, in the room and not. “I’m here. I can see you.”

And Bucky comes like someone's set off fireworks inside him.

* * *

“Ok, this,” Stark says, pulling none-too-gently on a frayed wire that maybe used to be attached to something near the elbow joint of Bucky’s arm, “I have no idea what this is.”

Bucky shuts his eyes and counts to three.

“That’s exactly the kind of confidence-inspiring thing I want to hear right now.”

“It’s fine.” Tony waves, trying desperately for nonchalance. “It’s cool. I got this. Just… Ah, ok. No. I don’t got this.”

Bucky growls.

“Relax Barnes, no big deal, I have diagrams.” Stark makes a complicated series of motions with his fingers and a glowing holographic outline of Bucky’s arm appears in the empty air between them.

“See? It’s fine. I’ll just—“ The diagram expands, zooms in. “I’ll have everything right back where it should be in no time.” He gestures and the picture changes, parts fall away, he moves them aside, then moves them back.

“No, I need a macro view of—“ Stark mutters, and menus pop up. “Yeah, ok here we—“ He stops. “What the hell is all this?”

Bucky shrugs, even though he has the distinct feeling Stark’s not talking to him.

“JARVIS, what’s all this crap?” Stark asks, flipping through screens, flinging some off to the side.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, sir.” JARVIS’s voice comes through crisp and clear on Stark’s souped up workshop speakers, and despite himself, Bucky flushes just a little.

“Uh, medical files, archival military footage, the entire contents of a super depressing ebook collection, and, most alarmingly, a staggering quantity of illegally downloaded movies, sorted and tagged according to mood.”

“Files pertaining to Barnes, James Buchanan,” JARVIS supplies.

“Yes, I can see that, but—“ Starks rubs at the bridge of his nose, “—why are they here, on the secure server, where we keep important stuff like advanced cybernetic arm diagrams and definitely not personal media libraries?”

The soft click is even less audible on the workshop speakers, but Bucky catches it. A few seconds pass.

“Jesus,” Bucky groans, “don’t throw a fit cause your AI likes me better than you. Arm. Fix. Now.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Tony mutters, and grudgingly gets back to work. The glare he summons up when Bucky winks at the ceiling and says, “Right back atcha,” sure is something though.

**Author's Note:**

> Jarvis was reading to Bucky from Salinger's 'Nine Stories'. The title is from 'My Fair Lady', where Henry Higgins insists - "I have my own soul! My own spark of divine fire!" I thought Bucky and JARVIS would both know that feel.


End file.
